Reader's Watchdog: State museum can't find some donated artifacts

Dec. 28, 2012

The State Historical Society of Iowa has been improving the organization of its permanent collection and archive, which consume almost a city block. The larger items are harder to store as racks and racks of items line the basement floor. andrea melendez/the register

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To donate items

Items donated these days to the State Historical Society of Iowa’s museum are reviewed by the staff to determine if they fulfill the museum’s collecting plan, whether they duplicate existing items and if they can be adequately cared for. If an item is not selected, the staff will suggest other options to the prospective donor. To offer an item for donation to the museum, fill out an online donation form at www.iowahistory.org/museum/donation-form.html. Your offer will be emailed directly to a museum specialist, and you will receive a response within 30 days. The society may identify an item and provide historic interpretation. However, it cannot provide an appraisal of the value of an item.

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Earl Wagner owned gravel pits in Marion and Jasper counties along the Des Moines River in the 1950s, and it was there he made some interesting finds.

His daughter Joyce Maskrey, 68, remembers taking some of them — prehistoric bones, tusks and petrified wood — to show and tell.

Years later, Maskrey wondered what happened to those artifacts, which her father ultimately donated to the State Historical Society of Iowa in the mid- 1950s. Her curiosity intensified after archeologists flocked to Oskaloosa, where the bones of a prehistoric mammoth were found in 2010 in a family’s backyard.

About 15 years ago, the Pleasant Hill woman stopped in the museum and tried to find out what had happened to her father’s donations. Maskrey said her father gave items to the museum at least twice, maybe three times.

“No results were shown of anything donated,” she wrote me. “Disappointing system, that’s for sure.”

Maskrey’s inquiry to the Reader’s Watchdog took a few weeks, in part because a historical society registrar combed through hard-copy printed ledgers of donations to the society from 1939 to 1970. Alas, none of Wagner’s donations could be found.

“Record-keeping was not the same then as it is today,” conceded Jeff Morgan, a public information officer for the society.

While donations were recorded, he said, some decades ago were handled with a handshake.

Today, all donations are recorded with a name, date, the geographic location the donation originated from, and a photo to identify it, Morgan said.

Since the museum moved in 1987 to its current location near the Statehouse in Des Moines, the vast majority of its 120 years’ worth of collections have been stored in the basement.

Roughly 25,000 to 30,000 artifacts are held at a handful of other sites across the state, including the Montauk Historic Site, home of former Iowa Gov. William Larrabee, in Clarion.

“Staff believes Mr. Wagner’s bones are still here,” Morgan said. “We are going to continue to review and research our records.”

Volunteers from the University of Iowa and Iowa State University have helped excavate the fossils in Oskaloosa. The University of Iowa Museum of Natural History is overseeing the project.

Nearer Des Moines, a 7,000-year-old village nicknamed “the Palace” also has generated excitement among U of I archaeologists because it is so well-preserved. There, researchers hope to find the tools villagers used, the types of animals they kept and ate, and the types of seeds they planted.

The remains of two humans were found there — the oldest human bones found in the state.

Maskrey has been amused by all the excitement surrounding the finds because she knows her father is among those who found other prehistoric treasures near the Des Moines River basin. As a kid, she hated that he turned them over to historical society. “I was the hit of the school for a few days after show and tell,” she said.

Maskrey said she has had other items she considered giving to the museum over the years, but the failure to find her father’s donations “held me back.”

Mary Cownie, who oversees Iowa’s Department of Cultural Affairs, said the museum does have objects like Maskrey described. She encouraged Maskrey and her relatives to think of other information that could help them in their search. Thus far, all Maskrey can recall is that they might have been logged under the name of her father’s business, Wagner Sand & Gravel of Monroe.

She believes they most likely would have been donated before the museum moved to its new building, when the society was housed in the Ola Babcock Miller building on East Grand Avenue.